Brass Head

You are prescient! The stitch-length lever was just about unmovable. The problem seemed to be in other parts of the mechanism than the sliding-block gizmo. (Hard to tell when you can't get right at the stuff.) Anyway, for really stuck stuff I go to wd40, endless wiggling, then waiting overnight. That half-solved it. Then yesterday I got the thing sewing (perfectly and quietly), I sewed with it for a while, and the lever (and other stuff) limbered up - got reacquainted with one another is how I like to think of it - and now it's absolutely fine. I also had to give the feed dogs a little boost. The same can be said for the eight canine dogs we're looking after: the cold had them sluggish too. A little wiggling got them squared away as well.

I take this voodoo idea of parts getting to know one another again pretty seriously. I even put allegedly-identical screws back in their original holes so that everybody gets to work with their accustomed partners. I know sometimes we flip parts to get a new bearing surface (the bronze bushings in old Jaguar ball joints were like that: they were like a doughnut, and you just rotated them 180 and were on your away, until your Lucas electrics burst into flames in their weekly go at self-immolation. Like many, I learned auto mechanics by buying a British car!), but sewing machines like to go with what they know. Bless their little hearts.

Rambling.

Cari-in-Oly

There are many things better suited to unfreezing/unsticking sewing machine innards than WD40. PB Blaster, Kano Kroil, kerosene, Tri Flow oil, etc....
My favorite thing to use is 90% rubbing alcohol and Qtips. It's cheap, works really fast and evaporates cleanly. Just don't get it on paint of black machines. I've had no problems with using it on colored machines to get old stuck on oil stains off the paint but I don't let it evaporate there I wipe it away.

Cari

Brass Head

Yeah, I've tried a few of those. I harbor a suspicion that wd40 is really just highfalutin' kero. I have had a can of PB Blaster for a couple of years: just can't get with using something with a name like that on a beloved sewing machine. The Kroll is kinda expensive, no? (though a bottle will last a couple of lifetimes, I suppose) The Tri-flow generates a suspicious teflon sludge in he bottle, if I'm thinking of the right stuff.

I use kero for all sorts of things. I have a little kero heater which I point at my oldest dog (15, blind, happy) when it's cold. I add a little oil to it for use on my oil stones (and on rusty bolts) We lived without electricity for about eight years, and most of our light was via Aladdin mantle lamps. I even kind of like its archaic smell. I picture some old farmer in 1902 out in the ell, filling his wick lamps on a late afternoon.

The main thing might be that kero plays so nice with the various finishes. (I still do a test spot, natch.)

Brass Head

OK, the Husqvarna Model 12 is done, working perfectly, a wonderfully quiet little machine. I'm gonna try another picture. We'll see how it goes this time. It's a pdf, well under the size limit, I believe. I uploaded it "from a computer": no idea whether that's good or bad!

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Heh heh: that ain't a pictchuh! I'll try that URL thing, if I can.

Cari-in-Oly

WD40 is actually a water displacement product(hence the WD in the name) not a lubricant. It will leave sludge behind when it evaporates just like 3in1 oil or anything else we shouldn't be using. The teflon in Tri Flow oil is in such a small amount that it will actually help protect metal parts not sludge them up. Tri Flow has become a favorite among sewing machine gurus and aficianados everywhere, in fact one expert in the field has said that if Tri Flow products had been available back in the day manufacturers would have recommended it. The only places in a sewing machine that i don't use Tri Flow is any place where there's a wick, those places I use regular sewing machine oil. There's some debate whether the teflon will clog a wick so I err on the side of caution there, but use it everywhere else.

Cari

Mickey2

There's a lot of hoopla regarding oils and greases. I have tried to look up the ingredients of the most common brandsm, but haven't found anything in full detail. One problem is the secrecy around the various brand recepies; the closest I came were saftey data sheets along with the basic info online.

There's lots of rumors on some of the oils and I suspect hardly half of them comes close to the truth. (The producer of WD-40 swears they don't use fish oil!) I register peoples experiences, but trust mostly my own. WD-40 is a lubricant, made to work fast, displace water and evaporate to a reasonably durable film coating the surface. It works much better than nothing, but there are lubricants with better specs regarding durability and lessening friction. It's very thin, most of it is hexan, a very thin solvent, thinner than white spirit. I have never found out why WD-40 makes machines stick or freeze up more than the basic sewing machine oil, but it does (for me it has been the stitch length mechanism two different Singer 99s). The reason might be it dries up too quickly along with old dirt and grime?

Nothing is as slippery as teflon, so I guess any teflon sluge in an oil would be to advantage. I haven't registered anything in the Triflow, but it's solid black bottle and I only see the few drops comming out of opening. Another oil I like is Finish Line, it has a tendency to a sort of sludge at the bottom of the bottle. It works well, I have used it for years and it doesn't dry up to anything sticky. According to the producers it has nano particle teflon and boron nitride, and what I notice is something a notch or two smoother than the basic sewing machine oil.

Very few oils offer any improvement to a good basic sewing machine oil. It is a refined acid free oil, I think is about the equivalent of SAE 10. Spray can oils are thinner, but does a very good job dissolving old muck and grime and speed things up. Triflow and Finish Line Ceramic Wet Lube are the only two I have bought more than one bottle of.

A few usefull additives are telfon it makes things run very smoothly, and maybe solvents too speed things up. They tend to be various refinements of petroleum, hydro carbons all of them. It's all a bit confusing and hard to know the difference. I suspect white spirit is the most efficient of them, kerosene the next runner up? Hexan is super thin and what makes the spray can oils penetrate like nothing else, but I don't know how it acts on its' own.

Winter green or methyl salicylate is one of the substances dissolving rust and freeing up stuck machines. I don't know too much about the subject, but I note down what I find most usefull for the purpose.

Brass Head

Heh. I just bought a gallon of sewing machine oil ("Zipperstop Lily White": couldn't pass up something with a name like that), so I'm pretty sure I know what I'll be using for a while. We have a number of hand grinders in the kitchen (coffee, spices, grains, seeds: my wife's a 50-year vegan, so...) I've been squirting the Lily White onto those for a while, and we're feeling fine, so I guess it's fairly non-toxic, at least.

The Tri-Flow looks to me like a quite volatile solvent, which I assume evaporates, leaving behind the (insoluble) teflon smutz it holds in suspension. It's too much of a stretch for me from the sperm whale oil originally recommended for some of my machines to something so exotic. I hate the smell, too: far worse than kero. I bought a little bottle once, squirted it here and there, and let it go. Seeing that immobile deposition of white gluishness on the side of a bottle I had laid in my toolbox was too much for me.

The real reason I have abandoned it is likely that I am a certified curmudgeon who vastly prefers older over newer in all areas except for produce.

I've used WD40 for a long time. (As a kid, I was a Liquid Wrench guy: swiped my father's can at eight or so.) I got my first can of WD when a guy said I could spritz it into a wet distributor to get my (wreck of a) '57 Jaguar going. I couldn't fathom squirting "oily" stuff into an electrical component, but it worked. (The Jag, by the way, in one of the weirdest likely-adventitious safety interlocks of all time had it's distributor mounted diectly beneath the radiator cap, so that when when it boiled over (as it did most days) it would debouch coolant onto the distributor, safely and immediately stopping the mighty twincam.) Later versions of the redoubtable twincam moved the distributor to the back, I have read. It would never occur to British engineers to mak a car that doesn't boil over: far more their thing simply to move the offending distributor.

After that I used WD for all sorts of stuff (except during my Marvel Mystery Oil phase, when my world smelled of wintergreen). WD is like Frank's Hot Sauce: you can dump it to good advantage on nearly anything. It's great on iron treadle bases: squirt it on, rub it briskly off, and you're good: no actual paint needed). It's not the ONLY thing I use, of course. I use a proper potentiometer cleaner when I'm working on electronics (used to repair guitars). I use a lot of kero-plus-oil. I schmirp linseed oil (boiled) on outdoor tools I'm gonna leave...outdoors, and so on.

Lubricants (and ...darkly...pseudo-lubricants) are a topic worthy of endless discussion, but I have to throw together my bean and carrot casserole for the vegan in the other room.

I see that my pic has been replaced with some imponderable blue nomenclature: I will NEVER figure this photo thing out.

Cari-in-Oly

WD40 does have its uses but I rarely use it any more. Anything that betrays me becomes suspect. Years ago my moms house had big heavy doors from the back hall to the laundry and from the laundry to the garage. Those doors were very squeaky and creaky so one day I WD40'd the heck out of the hinges so I could sneak out at night without getting caught. The hinges were quiet for only a few hours, that night the doors were just as noisy as before and I got busted. So I just can't trust that stuff.

Cari

Brass Head

Yeah, for general lubrication it's about useless. Never-Seize (esp. on woodstove hinges) and motor oil do the job there.

P.S. I guess Permatex makes it now, and they call it "anti-seize." Lawyers!!!!

Brass Head

I'm ready for another try a posting a photo...I think.

p.s. Success. And it works beautifully: my wife loves it.


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